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This lecture examines the work of Hugo de Vries, a Dutch botanist who was one of the first to claim that science would allow plants and animals to be designed to order.
Sydney’s botanic garden, founded in the early nineteenth century, was expected to ship new plants 'home' to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, from where they could be transplanted to other colonial gardens, to see if they could become valuable new crops to enrich the British Empire.
This lecture will begin with Bacon’s imagined garden, then consider the long-term promise of the experimental or scientific garden, which would eventually lead to today’s biotechnologies.
This lecture starts by looking at early-modern understandings of the nature of ‘animal’ and ‘human’ life, before turning to the rise of ‘rights of animals’.
This lecture explores how regulators try to prevent what will hopefully be the ‘last’ bubble and suggests that the most effective regulatory frameworks were developed during the normal operation of markets, not in response to crises.
Torture was officially outlawed in France in the 1780s and in Europe during the nineteenth century. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it has returned as an instrument of state policy.
In this final lecture we will consider whether we can plot a more successful future than our recent history might suggest and what that implies for our economic and political institutions.
The experience of inter-mediation in the UK does not encourage the thought that long term finance can easily be located. Do we need a Development Bank?
Housing represents the main asset class held by UK households and we shall try to understand why it is held as such a large share of assets. We shall then outline whether this choice has other knock on effects in the economy such as labour and social mobility.
We will carefully outline the categories of savings held by households and link that to the operation of financial intermediaries in providing loanable funds.